


Spiralling Down

by LectorEl



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker learns all the wrong lessons from his banishment, Booker loves the team, Depression, Gen, Spiralling - the expanded edition, The working title of this fic was 'Booker Please Just Talk To Someone (No Not Him)', Unreliable Narrator, non-sympathtic interpretation James Copley, now with more self-loathing and bad decisions, that doesn't actually help much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26998804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LectorEl/pseuds/LectorEl
Summary: The others leave. Booker stays at the safehouse, and lets himself fall apart.The steps from depression to deception to betrayal, and back again.
Relationships: Booker & The Guard, Booker | Sebastien le livre/Bad Decisions
Comments: 19
Kudos: 69





	Spiralling Down

It's no one's fault when the job in Ghent goes sour. 

Perhaps that's why it hits Andy so hard. Faults can be corrected. These little disasters - the badly maintained roof access, the cigarette butts left smoldering, the grill's propane container forgotten by the door - add up in unpredictable, unforeseeable ways. Accidents happen. People die. 

(Not them, of course. Not permanently. He has never been that lucky.)

Andy takes it badly, as she so often does when things go wrong. And so many things have gone wrong in the past few decades. So many victories snatched precariously from the jaws of defeat. 

Some days Booker looks at Andy, the weary slump of her shoulders and the distant expression on her face, and all he sees is himself. The exhaustion of someone who is too tired to go chasing death, and has resigned themself to waiting for it.

Time. _She needs time_ , she says, and unspoken but heard all the same is, _alone_. Booker hopes it helps. It’s a terrible thing, to live so long and be so weary. Andy deserves better. She’s always borne the weight of her grief with greater grace than Booker bears his.

Upon her request, they make plans to part. Joe and Nicky together, as usual, to go on an undoubtedly life-affirming honeymoon. Andy to whatever secret space she hides her sorrow. Booker - Booker tells lies about a library, and private art collection he’s meaning to investigate.

(Forger and forgery, all parts of him are false. He knows one day they’ll realize. All he can do is keep putting it off.)

That the others believe him is further proof of how out of place he is among them. Booker hasn't had the energy to do anything but follow in decades.

Some people aren’t born tired, fated to shuffle wearily through life and fall grateful into the grave. Amelia had been like that, eager to see and do and experience everything existence could offer her. Their middle child, Jean-Pierre, had inherited Amelia’s smile and her exuberant joy for living. Their other boys took after Sebastien more, but neither had carried the same melancholy that had marred their father’s soul.

(Before everything went wrong, Sebastien had taken comfort in that. Whatever else his failings, he had done well enough with his family not to taint them with the grey weariness that had lived in his bones since he was young. 

In his bleaker moments, Booker suspects that the universe thought it a grand joke, to have left Sebastien standing alone among their graves.)

Nicky and Joe are like that.

If Booker had made the slightest indication he’d rather not be alone, they would have folded him into their plans without any hesitation. He’d have walked out of his bedroom to find his bags already packed and Joe paging through old journals, looking for art museums to visit. Protesting would be useless, Nicky ready to distract him with cheerful provocation, until somehow they were ten miles up the road and Booker would’ve had to jump out of the car to escape.

It’s who they are, who they chose to be. Joe is one of the most genuinely _good_ individuals Booker has ever known. Nicky, even when being a vicious-minded little shit, is far kinder, and more patient, than Booker deserves. Too long besides them, and Booker is left feeling small and unworthy, his flaws magnified by the contrast to their characters.

There’s not many secrets Booker has managed to keep from them. By far the greatest is his own cowardice. He never wants them to see him as he truly is - a weak, grasping creature, dragging down all those around him.

The deception is not without problems. If Booker lets himself fall into the comfort of detachment, they see, and hurt for seeing it. Andy, at least, is willing to overlook his lapses, as long as he overlooks hers in return. Nicky frets and worries, watching Booker like he might suddenly collapse, or start coughing blood. Worse still, Joe seems to take them as a personal failing, a sign that he is somehow _neglecting_ Booker. 

Booker had tried, over the decades of their acquaintance, to convince Joe not to take on the impossible responsibility of Booker’s own happiness. It only ever seems to make Joe more careful, more attentive. 

Inevitably, Booker ends up enlisting Nicky to distract the man, which in turn means that Nicky will make a heartfelt effort to let Booker know that he was _always welcome, little brother, if you need us don’t hesitate to come home_ . Forcing Booker to lie and promise he would, _of course, now please go and distract your husband_.

Booker loves them. He knows it like he knows gravity or the memory of the noose. 

He just - doesn’t feel it anymore. There's a hollow space in his chest, rotted out like the heart of a dead tree. Booker is tired of living, scraped clean by the burden of it. 

(He wants to go home. But home is over mountains and across seas, buried by the passing of centuries and fading more with every day. Home is a graveyard with bodies that have turned to dust, and the names of people who loved him, once.)

The others leave. Booker stays at the safehouse, and lets himself fall apart.

He found a balance, decades ago, for these empty expanses between missions. Groceries, nonperishable, delivered once a month, to quiet the worst of the hunger pains; the water and electric bills set to auto-pay.

Booker sleeps, rises long enough to eat an energy bar or a protein shake, takes a drink straight from the faucet, goes back to bed. Dies a few times of alcohol withdrawal, because it’s easier than going out to buy more.

So it goes. He sleeps, and wakes, dies, and wakes again. On better days he works on false IDs and erases traces of the team’s true ones. Time passes. He waits for Andy to contact him, tell him there’s another job, another mission to complete.

James Copley contacts him first. The man is luckier than he realizes - the others would leave him dead on the ground the moment he spoke of immortality. But Booker is ever a student of self-destruction, and the blandishments of potential bad decisions are as tempting as ever. Booker hears him out.

' _Samples_ ', Copley writes. _'Skin cells, blood, bone, tissues from the organs.’_ The first two are given easily enough, Booker allows. Swabbing and skin scraping are simple enough, and they all know how to draw blood. Bone and organ tissue, however, would be significantly more difficult to gather without revealing their identities.

Copley wants them to reveal their identities. 

Booker pictures Andy’s response to that, swallows hysteric laughter, and tells Copley he’d have a better chance of convincing the sun to rise from the west.

Copley keeps writing anyway. It is an erratic, inconsistent correspondence, driven by the tides of Booker's moods and Copley's work. Booker should kill Copley now. Should have killed him weeks ago, truly. Before the mortal man gets impatient with convincing the immortals, and moves on to forcing them. He has already uncovered so much - if he’s given more time to dig, he’ll eventually find something to hold over their heads.

But Andy still has not made contact, and Joe and Nicky are too in love for Booker to justify interrupting over something as small as his own unease. And despite himself, Booker had gotten attached. James Copley knows Booker in all his shame and weakness, everything he’s tried to hide. Theirs is a relationship made warm by mutual contempt. There are no illusions between them about what sort of men they are.

 _‘It might be possible to gather samples without the others knowing,'_ Copley suggests, months later. _‘An ambush would provide a wealth of material to work with, and proof to the claim at the same time. No one but you and I, and the researchers who would study it, would have to know.’_

A few weeks after that, Copley sends him the shortest letter yet. Two lines.

_'If we find out what causes it, we should be able to reverse it._

_You'd have a choice again.'_

It's a well chosen goad. Booker finds he has the energy to go chasing death, one last time.

*

When everything is over, they finally cut him loose.

It has all the pain, and relief, of an amputation. They’ve given up on him, seen through his act, and it’s a strange relief. 

One hundred years - long enough for Andy to die in peace, long enough for Nile to forget the man she knew for a handful of days. 

Nicky and Joe won’t be waiting for him, in a hundred years. Not if they have any sense. Booker isn’t someone they should trust anymore, with his hollow-tree heart and faithless longing. There's nothing in him of what he knows he should feel - shame, self-loathing, regret, grief. (Knows this like he knows his love, with the certainty of gravity, and the noose. Booker wants to go home, and the world is as distant as his family’s graves.)

He's sorry, distantly, that they were hurt. He's sorry, distantly, that it didn't work.

The last comfort he has is that he knows where he went wrong. Merrick and Dr. Kozak cannot be the only people interested in the medical applications of immortality. He'll do this right, next time. No intermediaries, no mention of others like him. Just Booker, and the promise of his final ending.


End file.
